STRIKE AND TUMULT? LISTEN TO PAUL
The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham is a wonderful place for anybody to visit and a magnificent spiritual tonic for those who make a pilgrimage there. I have led a number of weekend parish pilgrimages over the years when our party (usually 20-30 people) arrives on Friday afternoon and leaves on Sunday morning.
The last act in the programme before boarding the coach home is to sing together (to the tune of “Dear Lord and Father of mankind”) a hymn with the following words:
O Holy House of Walsingham, here would we ever dwell!
But Jesus calls us to the strife and tumults of our daily life……..
Strife and tumults. You can say that again. The devil incarnate Putin rampaging in Ukraine causing death, destruction and world shortages of energy. Desperately poor people in our own country facing the danger of not being able to feed or heat themselves. A chaotic right wing government in free fall, their policy of tax cuts for companies and the rich in tatters…………..OK I’ll stop there before I lose my rag.
That Walsingham farewell hymn used to ring in our ears and leave us eager to do our bit for the kingdom of God undeterred by whatever the world or politicians could throw at us.
With or without “benefit of Walsingham”, that is what we must each do now. Our bit for the kingdom.. And the cornerstone we build from is our faith in the existence of God and our belief that Jesus Christ His son is the risen and ascended Lord.
So, amid the miseries, the folly and the evils of our world and our country, of course we want and need to help spread the hope-filled news of the gospel but the first brick wall we hit is the brick wall of secularism.
And, despite the historically large number of churches in our city of Brighton and Hove, and despite its colourful, multicultural inclusiveness, this city is a pretty secular place. Atheists, agnostics, scoffers. The place is crawling with them.
It’s sad. I feel particularly bad about people who have been put off the church because, as they have explained it to me, they have always been led to assume that scientific truth and religious truth are somehow incompatible, locked in battle, and they think they have to choose one rather than the other.
Now of course it may well be that a big bang brought the cosmos into existence (although even that may now be old hat in some scientific circles) but personally I’ve never found myself losing much sleep over rival theories of physics because it always seemed blindingly obvious to me that whether God was behind it all or not is an entirely separate question.
Is it some arrogance in mankind stemming from the intelligence and freewill we have been given that drives people to deny the existence of God? I don’t know.
It seems to be a peculiarly Western hang-up. In Africa and Asia, they don’t have this problem. Of course there’s a God, they would automatically say, (whether He is known as Allah or Jehovah or Jesus). They don’t go round complaining like Westerners do: “How can there be a God?” because of all the nastiness and suffering human beings choose to inflict on each other. They just say “Take a look at the miracle and the magnificence of creation – how wouldn’t there be a God? And when they suffer from natural disasters or wars, they pray to God to be alongside them.
In any case, what does the denial of the existence of God achieve? If you get rid of God, you get rid of any ultimate purpose or meaning to human life. So in the end, love becomes a cruel joke.
What is the point of feeling love towards each other, as we by nature we do, if we are all just arbitrary, accidental phenomena with an extremely limited span of sentient existence like flies buzzing against a window?
The truth is that each of us has an emotional heart and a precious soul and a sensitive conscience and a rational brain and an agile body. And all our faculties point to God and nudge us in His direction.
There is more to wisdom than being clever. How about wonder, openness and humility? – the humility for example of these words from the book of Wisdom:
It is hard enough for us to work out what is on earth, laborious to know what lies within our reach; who then can discover what is in the heavens? As for God’s intention, who could have learnt it, had God not granted wisdom and sent His holy spirit from above?
God will speak to us, if only we will let Him. He speaks to us, as even many scientists acknowledge, through the intricate order of nature. Landscapes and sunsets may be a bit of a cliché, I suppose (although they can take my breath away), but Mother Julian of Norwich saw it all just by holding in her palm a tiny hazel nut and gazing at it.
And when we have humbly opened ourselves a little to receive His gift of humble wisdom, we will then be ready for God to speak to us through the words of His beloved Son.
Ah yes, well now. That rather brings us up short against some bits of the gospel.. What is Christ really saying when He jars us with those distinctly uncomfortable words:
Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes and even life itself cannot be my disciple
Well don’t worry. The basic cost of discipleship is this. If you respond to God’s love, you will have to show that love of His in your own behaviour and that could be as painful for you as it is for Him.
But even before that, the rule has to be put God at the centre of your life.
If God does exist, then your relationship with Him must, when the chips are down, take priority over even the closest human relationships. (That’s what all the hate your father and mother business means.)
True. But then the chips are not always down, and when they aren’t, we can find just the opposite: that our love of God enhances and transforms our human relationships.
And so now I turn to PAUL’S LETTER TO PHILEMON.
It’s a lovely, intensely warm and human little letter written from Paul’s prison cell in Rome to an old friend..
Philemon had a slave called Onesimus who had robbed his master and fled. Later, as luck would have it, Onesimus, the thieving slave, met Paul and was converted and baptized by him. Now Paul wants Philemon, the wronged master, to take Onesimus back – but not as a slave; as a friend and brother.
Paul pretends he would like to have kept Onesimus by his own side, had such an offer come spontaneously from Philemon. But Paul doesn’t really mean this. He is actually forestalling such a suggestion because what Paul really wants is to reunite Philemon and Onesimus no longer as master and slave but on the equal footing of beloved children of God, liberated by Christ.
What a grace-filled little gesture. What a wonderful, humble little letter inspired by love and the vision of God’s kingdom, written by an exhausted old man in prison, selfless to the end. And how lucky we are this tiny text has survived to teach us how to live.
Quite honestly, with treasures like these, not to mention the whole gospel at my fingertips, plus the awesome blessing of being fed at Mass by the body and blood of the saviour who gave His life for me, I don’t give a monkey’s about the big bang or whether the scientists decide they have room in their theories for God or not.
About the spiritually hungry lost sheep of our society, I do care. I care very much. Not because I think they’re going to burn in hell, which is a ridiculous idea, but simply because they just don’t know what they’re missing.